Google+ Spotify = Great Show

Unless you’ve been living somewhere without net access for the past week or so, you have heard about Spotify, an online music service that just launched in the U.S. The initial reviews have been pretty positive, and it has generated a lot of buzz, although it’s quite similar to some services that have been available here for some time (Rhapsody comes to mind). But there’s something pretty insidious buried inside music rental models like this. It’s prime territory for a bait-and-switch strategy. In fact, this approach could be exactly what the music labels are relying on.

As invites to Spotify’s free, introductory service roll out to curious users, and music subscription vets sit poised, their fingers hovering over “subscribe,” we’ve taken the liberty to condense all the key details about the top on-demand services on the market into one helpful infographic: Spotify, Rdio, MOG, Slacker Radio, Rhapsody and Grooveshark (streaming-only services like Pandora were not included because they do not have an on-demand offering).

“While the standard technique to track users across multiples sites / visits is to use cookies this is by no means the only way to do this. Last year Samy, with his famous evercookie application, showed that in fact many browser storages (Flash, locale storage) can be used to store a unique identifier that can act as cookie.”

“Social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web is today.”

Ever since co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO from Eric Schmidt in January, Google has been getting a lot more, well… businesslike. It has been closing down or winding up a variety of projects and experiments, including Google Health and Google PowerMeter, and now it has announced that it is closing the door on its entire Google Labs venture. Some features will be folded into existing products, but many may simply disappear altogether. While this may be an admirable sign of maturity, it could also make the Google culture less experimental — and therefore also less interesting, and ultimately less successful.